1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an apparatus and method for controlling cooling of electronic components of a fuel cell vehicle.
2. Background
In general, a fuel cell is composed of an electrode producing an electrochemical reaction, an electrolyte membrane for transferring hydrogen ions generated by the electrochemical reaction and a bipolar plate for supporting the electrode and the electrolyte membrane.
Electronic components included in a fuel cell vehicle are heated to 80° C. when the fuel cell is operated in a full power state, and thus the electronic components must be cooled using coolant.
FIG. 1 illustrates electronic components and a coolant loop of a conventional fuel cell vehicle.
Referring to FIG. 1, the fuel cell vehicle includes a motor 10, an inverter 20 for the motor, a high voltage DC-DC converter 30 (referred to as HV DC-DC hereinafter) and a low voltage DC-DC converter 40 (referred to as LV DC-DC hereinafter) as electronic components.
It is difficult to provide an individual coolant loop for each of the electronic components due to costs and packaging issues. Accordingly, the electronic components are connected in series and parallel with a coolant loop and cooled through a pump 50. This requires efficient cooling control.
However, a conventional cooling control technique cannot efficiently control cooling of the inverter 20 performing Insulated Gate Bipolar mode Transistor (IGBT) switching, HV DC-DC converter 30 and LV DC-DC converter 40 since the pump 50 is driven based on a signal of a coolant temperature sensor (not shown) attached to the coolant loop. To solve this problem, the conventional cooling control technique excessively drives the pump 50 even when the coolant temperature sensor signal indicates a relatively low temperature. This reduces fuel efficiency and generates noise.
The above information disclosed in this background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the disclosure.